Markaos

Circle to search for music is pretty much just a shortcut to Google's music detection available from the normal Google app

It's easy to dismiss as an ad. I did, too.

Well, Vivaldi's built-in in adblock apparently agrees with this categorization. The video shows up if I disable it. Lol

Where's the article?

In my very limited experience with my 5400rpm SMR WD disk, it's perfectly capable of writing at over 100 MB/s until its cache runs out, then it pretty much dies until it has time to properly write the data, rinse and repeat.

40 MB/s sustained is weird (but maybe it's just a different firmware? I think my disk was able to actually sustain 60 MB/s for a few hours when I limited the write speed, 40 could be a conservative setting that doesn't even slowly fill the cache)

manufacturers can put it where your hand naturally rests, meaning that you can unlock the phone BEFORE you have even taken it out of your pocket.

Idk, my "unlock" finger naturally rests wherever the fingerprint scanner is on my phone. When I had a rear fingerprint scanner, I used to have my phone's bottom right corner planted into my palm near the thumb and used the index finger to support its back near the scanner, so I was always ready to unlock it.

Now that I have an under-screen scanner, I use my pinky as a "shelf" for the phone's bottom side, ring finger to hold it on the far side and index finger along the near side (which makes me suspect this grip would work for in-power-button scanners too), and that makes my thumb naturally rest exactly on the spot where the scanner is. With (one) tap to wake, I have no problem unlocking the phone while taking it out of my pocket - literally just a quick double tap. Although it's true that you can't unlock the phone directly in the pocket like this, because the proximity sensor should prevent the tap to wake from working.

I used to have a phone with a scanner in the power button too, but I can't remember how I held it - I don't think it was the same way as now, because I'm pretty sure I never used to rest my thumb on screen like this.

But it's a design for designs - it tells you how to design your own UIs, it doesn't dictate what for example a calculator app should look like. You can follow Material Design and still end up with a terrible UI design.

Surely that's enough for some distinction, right?

So now I’m looking at that kind of parasitic situation with this FRP bypass lock. It’s almost as if the manufacturer wants phones to be thrown in the garbage so users are forced to buy from them rather than aftermarket. Noooooo. /s

It's a theft deterrent, so it would be kind of pointless if there was an intentional way to disable it other than to log in with the owner's account. The people providing the tools to bypass FRP want their cut of the stolen goods, that's all.

I'm not saying that your specific phone is stolen (although if you got it in this state... yeah, it most likely is, FRP triggers when you do a factory reset from the recovery instead of going through settings), but you have to understand that what you want is exactly what a thief would want, and the proce of the tools reflects that.

Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another

Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don't believe it's currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.

For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn't met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn't bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).

The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia's shitshow).

(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)

Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that's not something a reviewer could tell at the time.

Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn't seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn't have possibly be on HMD's radar were way too excited about it.

And my last point: we're not talking about reviewers here. This is about "#TeamPixel", Google's "organic" marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they're not even meant to compare it to other stuff.

It's even worse, they're not getting paid. These shills only get rewarded by getting the phones slightly before general availability (but after actual reviewers)

The Quick Share option missing is weird - Nearby Share/Quick Share is supposed to be available on every Android 6 or newer device since roughly 2020. And it's supposed to be able to automatically figure out a reasonable way to connect the devices (LAN if they are in the same network, Bluetooth or WiFi Direct otherwise).

They're not doing a recall, but that doesn't mean they won't somehow compensate big OEMs for their warranty issues.